Ask HN: What are the obstacles to learning on your own?
Why is that?
Sean (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SnootyMonkey) and I are passionate self-learners, and we struggle with this too. We have ideas (and prototypes) for a couple solutions that might go a long way towards helping self-learners overcome their obstacles, but we want to validate that we’re on the right track.
If you regularly try to learn stuff on your own we’d love to learn about your learning routine and obstacles. What makes it hard to start learning something new? What slows you down? What makes it harder than it should be? What makes you give up when you do?
If you only have a moment for us, leave a comment here.
If you have up to 5 minutes, please take our very short survey here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UXZygDbvjSyDhWpUxYPMUN-_7F01svwRuHU3bKMNAKc/viewform
If you have more than 5 minutes, we’d love to chat with you over Skype / Google Hangout / phone call / smoke signals / face-to-face (you can tell us you’re willing at the end of the survey).
Thanks! Happy learning.
that's a big one for me. I am in the process of trying this out, and it seems to be working: Practice, every day, for any amount of time, even if it is just for 30 seconds.
beginning French, advanced Javascript, beginning piano, advanced rails, and Im also working my way through the harvard classics.
I made a schedule of daily reading/doing, I shoot for 30 minutes for every subject (not daily, but pretty close), but I will at LEAST put in 1 minute.
One of the pain points was learning, what to learn first. Ie, a resource that said, here is the "must reads" to learn french, or piano would have saved me a bunch of time.
For the first one, once you give into those little temptations to distract yourself, it's much more difficult to get back on track than if you just ignored it in the first place. If you start to let yourself get distracted daily, you'll build bad habits that prevent you from staying on task. I know cause I've been there before.
For the 2nd point, expectations can be a HUGE obstacle especially when they go unfulfilled. People who are only working on something because of where it will take them and not enjoying the work at the moment, I think, have a very difficult time staying motivated on the task. Because if the expectation isn't coming, then it becomes harder and harder to stick with something.
I've put together a course to try to address these points and others that I see programmers commonly having a difficult time with. If you'd like to check it out, it's at https://www.programmingspiritually.com/
There are problems with the learners itself and there are problems with existing solutions.
Problem with learner: 1. Not being self Regulation
Existing Solution problems: 2. Different mental make up of user but similar intervention for all. 3. Challenges in Learning interventions discovery
Lets go in detail: 1. Regulation results into failure of self discipline. We are conditioned to be externally regulated and not internally. Our current system have conditioned that there would be someone who will tell them what to do. Be our school system or our parents. They will prevent us from doing something wrong or tell us what is the right thing to do. What we need is to make students feel they are responsible for their own decision and action. When you feel responsible for your action, you take things seriously. You get self disciplined. (Learned partially from: Paul Kim)(Reports on not using system regularly or in a disciplined way)
2. Different mental make up. We all are wired differently, but the courses offered are from one perspective in one way only. Every learner has a different level of understanding, learning gaps, misconception and learning style (MI theory by howard garnder) But courses today treats them same way. There might be a student struggling to learn compare fractions because he doesnt understand LCM. System needs to first dissect a learner to understand what he needs to learn and how he learns best and then offer the most effective learning intervention. That brings me to the last point.
3. Learning intervention: How do we find the right intervention for the student. There are lots of learning content online. Lots of curated content also available. But finding the content that suits me is a painstaking process. I have to keep trying till I find the right content.
I hope you guys find this useful. You can reach me at @aakashbarot if I can be of any help further.
2) Lack of time. A lot of people are students or have jobs, and their free time is already taken up. Also, people need large chunks of time to Download the Task - http://www.collegeanswerz.com/downloading-the-task.
3) Poor resources. See http://www.collegeanswerz.com/rethinking-education for how to make it better. My plan is to make money with that website, and then start to implement these ideas with a Big Push.
Making a game plan, Keeping a schedule, completing your projects.
Man cannot remake himself without suffering - For he is both the marble and sculptor. -Alexis Carrel
Examples: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html (thanks tokenadult) http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp... http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html
If you had a learning website built around teachers rather than subjects, I would definitely check that out.
Sound interesting?
Are you thinking a curated list of curators, or a social network where anyone can be an expert? Or something in between?
It's great you're tackling the whole learning frontier
Lack of motivation, i.e. Absence of "burning need" to learn the stuff at hand. Also, inability to visualize the end-result/reward.
Trying to look at the task as whole than in smaller parts: i.e. looking at a 720 pages, mostly text-only O'reilly programming book.
Multitasking: Checking news feeds, twitter and trying to learn/code/read simultaneously.
Distractions: people around, location, short attention span.
Not able to get into the zone/flow: This usually happens when,
goals are not clear
feedback is not immediate
lack of balance between opportunity and capacity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Appropriate reward and feedback system is really important in learning.As per some studies, it relates to certain neurotransmitters in the brain i.e. dopamine.
The only thing that makes self learning remotely manageable is to break up your goals in to manageable chunks.
Half the solution to self-motivation is deriving a satisfaction from completing goals.
If you set your goals reasonable, it obviously isn't a silver bullet, but it helps ALOT.
Nowadays you can get any information in micro-seconds, so people don't know the value of information.
Don't ever expect anything happen overnight